


Before You Came Into My Life {I Missed You So Bad}

by CypressSunn



Category: High Fidelity (TV)
Genre: Chocolate Box 2021, Chocolate Box Exchange, Chocolate Box Treat, F/M, Inspired by Music, Morning After, Pop music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29267505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: Rob wants to claw her ears out, or at least gouge deep enough with her fingers to scramble her brains like the eggs Clyde is frying. Because Top-40 music? In this economy? Unbelievable.
Relationships: Robyn "Rob" Brooks/Clyde
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Before You Came Into My Life {I Missed You So Bad}

**Author's Note:**

  * For [punch_kicker15](https://archiveofourown.org/users/punch_kicker15/gifts).



He listens to Coldplay unironically. Rob cradles her faces in her hands and asks herself what she has done wrong in her life to deserve this. To love a man who thinks Chris Martin is a poet.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“This is a deliberate torture. Playing _Yellow_ at eight in the morning is like, against the Geneva Convention.”

“Pretty sure playing Coldplay is not a war crime.”

Rob is padding around the floor trying to find her underwear, while unsure if she had even been wearing any last night. She remembers picking out the fuck-me dress that was little more than a black muscle shirt several sizes too big for her petite frame. The effect was essentially the same if Simon’s vote of confidence was anything to go by. 

Giving up, she slips back into her little black dress and clambers back over the bed. Through the open bedroom door she can see Clyde in his kitchenette pretending not to look at her. He goes back to wielding his spatula at the stove and cranks the abominable music even louder. Rob wants to claw her ears out, or at least gouge deep enough with her fingers to scramble her brains like the eggs Clyde is frying. Because Top-40 music? In this economy? Unbelievable. Especially after the night they had. Booze and dancing and party crashing; but maybe not in that order. Maybe, perhaps, more honestly starting with the party crashing when Cherise’s sister’s cousin’s roommate’s ex-college tutor had an invite to the bachelor party of a friend of Clyde’s. At least that’s what they told him when he first saw her, eyes wide and shocked and a little convinced he had a stalker. 

But they’d wound up back here, hadn’t they?

“I was worried you were planning on sleeping in,” Clyde announces as she slips out.

“Who could sleep through this noise pollution?”

Clyde’s hands drift dangerously close to his iPhone.

“Don’t,” Rob warns.

“Don’t what? Don’t…” his fingers tap the screen, the volume increases, “do that?”

Slouched over at his table, her face sinks into her palms.

“If you had any taste, you’d hand me that phone and let me pick literally anything better than this _falsetto_.”

Clyde gives her a look. “Sorry, this is one DJ you can’t kick out.”

“I didn’t kick out your friend’s DJ. I just suggested that he go ruin someone else’s bachelor party with his terrible remixes.”

“Hmm, no, I was standing right next to you when you did. Your exact words were, ‘hey buddy, you’re fired’ and then you stole the aux.”

“And saved the party!” That was the important part. Why is Clyde leaving that out? All his friends that weren’t well and truly plastered by then were bored out of their skulls. Even the ever responsible Clyde, the designated driver had been obviously having a terrible time. Rob had remedied that. And sure, unceremoniously firing the DJ wasn’t the best move to win back an ex, but fuzz guitar antics of The Black Keys had gotten the party moving. “Because of me, everyone headed straight to the dancefloor. And I even played you Bruno Mars so all you white boys could pretend to be the groom’s dancing entourage!”

It had been the most embarrassing thing she’d ever done for the sake of any man. May the foremothers of feminism forgive her. But it worked like a charm. The drunken groomsmen spent the night shouting _“put your pinky fingers to the moon!”_ to each other, even through _other_ songs.

“Why do you say it that way? That you played us Bruno Mars, like his music is some grand concession you were making to the masses?” Clyde points his spatula at her, incredulous. “What could you possibly have against Bruno?”

“How about the fact that he’s basically a James Brown wannabe? Or that he’s getting credit on the radio and awards shows for music black people made decades ago? White people never care about rhythm and blues until it isn’t black music.”

Clyde stops for a second. “Bruno… isn’t black?”

Rob breathes in through her nose. She thinks to herself, _I might love this white man. I might love this white man. I love might love white man._

Clyde, looking red-faced and lost, turns back to his iPhone and changes the song as Coldplay falls out. He seems to be scrolling frantically before he finds what he’s looking for. With a barely contained devious grin, he hits play. Unmistakable opening notes play through the stereo, an iconic shrill, F-Sharp staccato. Clyde looks up at her, real smug, as if expecting her to turn and run. That’s when Rob gets it. It’s a ploy. A maneuver. She should know an avoidance tactic when she sees one. He thinks he can chase her off with pop music.

“Wow… _How dare you?_ ”

“Hm? Oh you don’t like this? This isn’t really your taste?”

“Of course I like it. It’s _Toxic_. One of the top five greatest pop songs of all time!”

“Wait… what?” Clyde stutters and Godney’s breathy heaving voice is informing them she’s too high, she can’t come down. Clyde is blinking at Rob like she is an alien. “You… have a list of the top five _pop_ songs ever?”

“Yes. Because I’m not an animal.” Rob shimmies in her little black dress around the kitchen table. “Because I know not all pop songs are created equal. Because I know musical royalty when I hear it. And if you’re trying to get rid of me,” she accuses, “you’ll have to do worse than this.”

Clyde tries to look innocent while looking not so innocently at the rhythm in Rob’s hips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Rob sashays a little closer. She knows what she looks like. A hot mess of last night’s make up, all legs, and hair wild, but she still needs Clyde to know that the taste of these lips can take him on a ride.

He changes the song before she gets the chance.

“Oh, Clyde, I knew I liked you,” Rob laughs, bouncing on the balls of her feet to the hammered stringed out hook of _Call Me Maybe_.

“There’s _no way_ a music snob like you likes this song! Everyone hates this song!”

“Everyone _pretends_ to hate this song. Because it just so happens it’s the _second_ greatest pop song in existence. Tell me, are you just working your way down my list? Did I tell you while I was drunk last night, or are you just that good at picking cotton candy works of pop majesty?”

Clyde looks existentially lost. Like he does not know what to believe. “You’re screwing with me. You’re absolutely screwing me right now and only pretending to like this—”

Rob stops dancing and steps right up to Clyde and his too tall face. “Call Me Maybe, by Carly Rae Jepson, from her 2011 EP _Curiosity_ and later reissued on her album _Kiss_ in 2012. Originally written as a folk song, it was remixed by producers into a pop athem that was multi-platinum certified in a half dozen countries, except in the United States where the single went Diamond. And yes, a diamond rating is better than platinum.”

“I cannot believe you.” Clyde got a frantic, cornered look in his eye. He spies the kitchen window and looks ready to climb right out. But Rob isn’t finished.

“Now, everyone knows _Call Me Maybe_ is one of the catchiest things millennial pop has ever put out, that’s just a given. But what no one realizes is what the song is missing. That there’s no bassline in the verse and it still somehow got onto the charts, even though that’s basically impossible. The last song I can remember doing that was _Purple Rain_.”

“Purple Rain? Prince’s Purple Rain? Are you really comparing this teeny-bopper pop song to the artist formerly known as Prince?”

“But that doesn’t matter, because Call Me Maybe just _works_. It’s got the secret sauce. And you know what’s in that sauce?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t wanna know—” Clyde is laughing, half crying, half in fear.

“It’s _Sick Puppies_.”

“The super secret pop song sauce is made of sick puppies?” Clyde blanches and Rob nods exuberantly. “Are you… What does that even mean? How d’you even… You’re like a teeny, tiny crazy person who only speaks in musical riddles!”

Rob doesn’t slow down. “Dave Ogilvie, of the industrial band _Sick Puppies_ , mixed this track from the hi-hats to the drum machine until he created pop perfection—”

“An industrial band? Like, Nine Inch Nails kind of industrial rock music? That’s the guy who made _Call Me Maybe_?”

“Yeah, but only harder than Trent Reznor ever went. I mean, imagine the sickest, loudest album ever. That’s how you engineer a sound like this!” Rob blows something reminiscent of a chef’s kiss towards the speakers. “The punchy build of the drums, the acoustic guitars blending with the electric riffs, those string tones that sound like a piano slide, I still have no idea how you even made that sound! But they pull it off and somehow, like magic, none of the dimensions drown out the melodies of Carly and her voice! Even when they harmonize her vocals with an auto-tuned overlay in the chorus? It should be impossible and yet! And yet!”

“You’re insane,” Clyde tells her, throwing her off her breathless stride. “You are diamond certified, insane.” And fair enough, because maybe she had gotten a little away with herself. But Clyde is looking at her different. Different good. An infectious pop hook ear worm, stuck in your head for days, have to get closer to the speakers to hear it better good. And the magic of the bombastic, surprisingly wacky sound bending orchestral chorus is flowing through him and even he can’t help but dance in step with her. “I’m not getting out of this alive, am I?”

“Nope.” Rob shakes her head. Her hands rest on his chest, near the dip of a collar over the drum kick of his heart. It’s a good rhythm. Something she could move to. “I think you and me are gonna make beautiful playlists together.”

Clyde grins, eyes closed. “So long as you always have final say over the aux, right?”

“Yep,” she nods without a hint of remorse, and Clyde finally breaks to swoop her in for a breathless kiss. He pulls back, biting his lip.

“Now are you gonna show me the other three greatest pop songs ever?”

She smirks while Carly croons on about how she could miss a man so bad before he even came into her life. “Oh, I thought you'd never ask.”

_**fin.** _


End file.
